1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to schemes for automatically and intelligently reducing the amount of resources, time and experiments needed to present optimized websites to website visitors for maximum conversion rates.
2. Background
In the new digital economy it is often imperative that business entities have a website presence on the World Wide Web. However, having a website alone without careful, dynamic attention to its effectiveness does not guarantee meaningful success. While website related success may have different meanings, any evaluation of success is likely to take into account the “conversion rates” associated with the particular website. Conversion rates may be broadly defined as the rates in which visitors to websites engage in desired business activity during or as a result of visiting websites. The desired activities are defined by the website operator, but generally range from completing sales, making orders, viewing targeted advertisement, agreeing to be a subscriber, agreeing to receive future advertisement, participating in surveys, and many more.
Websites therefore need to be optimized to maximize associated conversion rates. Website optimization is a complex undertaking ideally bringing together several disciplines, including computer science, marketing, advertising, and psychology. Since a web page can have several elements, that each have several possibilities, and that the arrangement of the elements can have several possibilities, and that there can be several permutations and combinations of different elements, there can literally be millions of possible variations for the web page in question.
The challenge is therefore to present web pages to website visitors that will maximize conversion rates, a difficult enough task, when simply initially optimizing a website, which is made more daunting by the need to dynamically optimize a website in response to changes which may dynamically impact the economic and social behaviors of website visitors.
Website visitation experiences can be audio-visual, but have a strong visual aspect. Neuroscientific influences determine how a visitor will react to a particular web page or group of web pages, including visceral or “bottom-up” stimuli, and the more intellectual or “top-down” stimuli, and what actions the visitor might take. Much like scarce resources associated with macroeconomics, the perceptual and cognitive resources of animals like humans are also limited, causing humans to utilize important coping mechanisms for sensory overload and decision-making.
A well-designed website implicitly takes advantage of both bottom-up and top-down influences for achieving high conversion rates, although the prior art approaches to website optimization do not address these influences, and are heuristic approaches. Website optimization can rely entirely on the experience of consultants and designers who apply their rich empirical knowledge to produce a website expected to have a high conversion rate. Such an approach, however, is a subjective one that yields results that are not likely valid for actual, sustained use. What is successful for one website owner may not be successful for another website owner. Additionally, even when a newly designed website appears to have higher conversion rates than a previous version, such approaches lack empirical evidence that maximum conversion rates have been reached.
Other approaches include applying scientific methods of measuring website conversion, and running experiments for the purpose of finding a version of the website that has the highest conversion rate. The most effective of those methods is the multivariable (or “multivariate”) testing method, where multiple elements of the web page are varied at the same time, and data is collected from the actions of visitors who participate in the testing. This approach is offered by companies such as Google, Memetrics, Optimost LLC, SiteSpect, Offermatica, and Hiconversion, Inc. The latter company, the assignee of the present application for Letters Patent, is also the assignee of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/880,823 by inventors Francois Buchs, et al. directed to “Method and Apparatus for Real-time Website Optimization,” which is hereby incorporated by reference.
While it would be ideal to test all web page permutations in an optimization experiment, or a full factorial approach, the time, resources, and the number of website visitors who may be inconvenienced makes full factorial optimization approaches impractical. Therefore, fractional factorial approaches are typically used, where only a subset of page variations is tested and the best solution is found or statistically predicted based on those limited results.
In addition to the website optimization approaches of the Buchs, et al. patent application identified supra, which is a closed loop system (i.e., with feedback), several other optimization approaches have been used, including but not limited to the following. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,934,748 to Louviere, et al. discloses an automated open loop (i.e., no feedback) system for experimentation that includes an experiment engine which defines experiments relating to various treatments for a set of content elements. U.S. Patent Application Number 20040123247 by Wachen discloses a method and apparatus for altering electronic content that includes a template for assigning variables and values to a section of the content, a generator that creates the permutations of the content, a transmitter that provides the content to a requestor, and an evaluator and optimizer that aids in selecting the most optimal permutation of the content.
U.S. Patent Application Number 20060271671 by Hansen, discloses a method and system for optimizing web visitor conversion using a reverse proxy server to introduce page variations on existing website content without the need to modify the existing target server.
U.S. Patent Application Number 20030014304 by Calvert, et al., discloses a method for evaluating Internet advertisement effectiveness that involves collecting Internet activity information associated with a multitude of “cookies.” U.S. Pat. No. 5,968,125 to Garrick, et al. discloses a process for determining the effectiveness of a web page to a visitor by creating alternative and test web pages, sending requests to the test web page, monitoring the use of the web page and the rate that the web page objective was met, and replacing pages with the page most visited. U.S. Patent Application Number 20020042738 by Srinivasan, et al., discloses a method and system for measuring the effectiveness of the layout or appearance of a website advertisement to a visitor, wherein different visitors are shown different formats of the same page, response to the page is monitored, and statistics are analyzed regarding the responses.
U.S. Patent Application Number 20030018501 by Shan, discloses a method and system for processing test data relevant to specific behavior of visitors to a website. U.S. Pat. No. 6,662,215 to Moskowitz, et al., discloses a system and method for determining appropriate website content for consumers comprising a server arrangement, including a “real time content optimization” server, a user computer, and a network, wherein upon request a web page is generated for the user having static and dynamic elements which are tested for user reaction and response.
Regardless of the optimization approach, there is a long-felt, but unsolved need to reduce the number of web page versions that are included in optimization experiments, while not sacrificing the validity of the test results because fewer web pages have been used. This will greatly reduce the time and computation resources needed, and reduce the number of website visitors who will need to participate in website optimization experiments.
Thus, the formal use of saliency as an off-line pre-processing tool for making website optimization experiments more efficient has never been taught or suggested by the prior art. The use of saliency, for example, in prior art computing applications has been limited mostly to robotic and pattern recognition applications in general, or in the case of U.S. Patent Application Number 20060070026 by Balinsky, et al., for printed document design. In the main embodiment a user generates a draft document and creates a saliency map there from which rates regions of the draft document according to the saliency of that region, performs a comparison of the saliency of one or more predetermined regions against a relevancy rating for that region and alters one or more document parameters associated with the draft document if the comparison shows that one or more of the predetermined regions has a saliency that does not match that required by the relevancy data for that region.
Another use of saliency in computing applications include U.S. Patent Application Numbers 20020154833 and 20020154833 by Koch, at al., which disclose methods and systems for computation of intrinsic perceptual saliency in visual environments, and applications. The image is analyzed at multiple spatial scales and over multiple feature channels to determine the likely salience of different portions of the image. One application for the system is in an advertising context.
Saliency may be defined as any aspect of a stimulus that makes the stimulus stand out from among other ambient stimuli, and may include so-called “bottom-up,” memory-free reactions, and so-called “top-down,” memory-dependent or anticipatory mechanisms (such as pricing and quantity information, brand names, and descriptions).